Clapped Out Anglia

I’d get loads more gigs if I asked audiences “Hands up for a revolution!” but “Lobby your MP to vote against the Public Order Bill” ain’t so rock n roll, maaaan. 

So, this pale, stale artist resorts to attempting to use Anglo Saxon verse forms with ambeisn’t beats. Can’t fail, can it?

Inspiration Porn

White Cliff Johnny Panic & The Bible Of Dreams

The sound of someone keeping their mouth shut. Based on a tweet. 

Additional lyrics by @LoxyFlo

Directions to the Sunlit Uplands

Alec Clegg was Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire from 1945 to 1974. He believed in a liberal arts based education for all and held that such an approach stimulated better outcomes generally. Anyone going to a West Riding school would be encouraged to paint, draw, dance, sing, or learn a foreign language simply because it was the right thing to do. 

No-one today has ever heard of him. 

No child today escapes the grim “if-you-fail-maths-you-will-die” austerity of national curricula, academy chains and ofsted inspectors with bad hair and no dress sense.

This tune, whose first line is taken from an Ian McMillan article about Clegg, is a nostalgic howl for something better for our children.

Alec Clegg Can Still Dream

Directions to the Sunlit Uplands Die Dan Die remix

Radio Friendly version which can be played on the BBC or during election periods.

Wk51 Uploader

A Terrified Thing With Feathers (Radio Edit)

A poem on people agitating about things that don’t exist they heard about from people they can’t identify somewhere they can’t find on a map. Like something from The Golden Bough but with free wi-fi.  See the big budget video at https://youtu.be/5m5WO0zFPLY?si=rtEh-1gp6-B3__VN

7 DEADLY BINS

Waiting for a train, steaming cafe in the rain 
Persisting now for months, he just sits and stirs stewed tea, 
starts chatting on at me and from the snatches I can catch 
he’s growling about the roadworks outrage.
He blames everything on Labour, Tracy Brabin, City of Culture 
I didn’t catch why, ‘cos I needed my train, 
flash a funeral smile, flick a quick goodbye, 
Step into venom-drenched bedlam 
where drilling monsters jeopardise 
The haze-shrouded buildings that are gravestones fading
Like that novel you always threatened to write.

Never having kissed under bridges;
Head deep in a flick book of hashtag grudges,
Redoubling the effort though we’ve forgotten the aim
Drowning eyes doused in foul screens.

Incensed remembrance condenses on windows,
Indignation fizzes like piss on a fire. 
Then, out of the flames like a catholic saint 
Dumb passion attempts a catlike escape.

From somewhere, nowhere, a weakling notion
Tiptoes through late trains of thought that one day
Concrete and tyres might line up like planets,
Car park potholes sprout timeless pop classics,
Denial will lose interest in glittery whims,
See the art in being ugly, instead of arguing with machines.
And ageing men fading will realise 
the fight or flight brain site 
Didn’t discover penicillin; will realise 
They’re still alive with knees that really ache,
Like hearts in cheap songs in a better-looking age;

Will realise change and age are not mistakes, 
breathe deeply and smell 
the bus-stop where they first fell in love

Will realise we’re still alive when we ache, 
breathe deeply and smell 
the bus-stop where they first fell in love.

Adultification

A response to what happened over the summer. Not a parable. Not literal. All that. More prosaically, this is the first track issued as Jimmy Andrex and the Bible of Dreams. Having two names was just confusing people, which is a sub-optimal practice.

Bad Actors

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

James Baldwin

Bewilderment

This is the result of a collaboration between myself and RCM Composer Amy Bryce for the Leeds Lieder Festival 2016.  The accompanist was Martyn Noble and features Mezzo Soprano Sarah Jane Lenney.  Additional piano treatment (i.e. abuse of said instrument) with Blu Tak and anything to hand by Amy Bryce and Martyn Noble.  
I'd lost my dad four days previously to the festival performance but working on this over several months, especially accommodating Amy's suggestions, then the workshop and performance made me happier than most anything that's ever happened.

Green Children of Woolfit

A sermon in words and music and bleeps.  Holly McNish makes a fortune out of it, so why shouldn't we.  Stamp out obviousness.  Northern Beat Poets rule.

YMNLT Vol. 9: XMAS (Dec 2017)

The Northern Beat Poets Christmas Message

In a Post-truth world, with people searching for identity, not always in a good place, what might happen if singers just sang in their regional accents about ordinary stuff like debt, housing, boredom and dreams?

Produced by Rob Sharp

Teenage karaoke

Defying lockdown to broadcast from the village next to the one Geoff Boycott grew up in.

Jimmy Andrex & the Bible of Dreams

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